Day: May 21, 2023

“It is finished.”

The sixth word of the Crucified in Fr. Alonso Messio Bedoya’s ordering of the last words of Christ on the Cross is from St. John’s account of the Passion. John’s last word of Christ is the penultimate word in the sequence of the seven last words. “It is finished,” Jesus says, “and he bowed his head, and gave up his spirit.” It is a profound and moving moment.

“The end of all things is at hand,” Peter tells us in the Epistle for today while the Gospel speaks about the Comforter, “the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father,” who “shall testify of me,” Jesus says, even as we also are to bear witness in the face of hostility and persecution. What kind of ending is this?

“It is finished” signals the completion and ending of all that belongs to human redemption in terms of the overcoming of sin and evil through the perfect sacrifice of the Son to the Father. It expresses the meaning of the coming of Christ to “do the will of him who sent him.” What is that will? To redeem the whole of creation. All that goes forth from God returns to God. Such is the radical truth of creation even in the face of negation of God’s will by sin and death. There is no truth apart from the will of God.

Ascension Day marks the ending of the mission of the Incarnate Son in his going forth and his return. It is his homecoming but one which establishes our homeland. Here we have, as Hebrews famously puts it, “no continuing city” (Heb. 13.14). We have our true abiding in God. Christ’s return to the Father is the completion of the work of redemption accomplished in his body. His return is the exaltation of our humanity, as the Fathers’ note, as well as the restoration of the whole of creation to its truth in God. Christ’s Ascension then leads to his Session, to his being seated at the right hand of the Father. This is a powerful image, a way of representing God’s providential rule made manifest in the Passion and Resurrection of Christ. They end or culminate, we might say, with the Ascension and the Session.

But the radical meaning of these Scriptural and Credal doctrines so easily escapes us. We forget that it happens in the body of our humanity which Christ assumes from Mary. It means that we in our humanity are given a vision of our place with God in Christ; in short, that as he is so shall we be also. What that means exactly is beyond our conceiving and imagination. “Beloved, we are God’s children now; it does not yet appear what we shall be, but we know that when he appears we shall be like him.” Yet it is enough to say that as he is so shall we be also for it is about our being gathered to God, not God being collapsed into the confused agendas of our day. The Ascension testifies to the truth of creation and its redemption in Christ. As the great Ascension hymns emphasize, the risen and ascended Christ shows the marks of the Cross. They are the marks of divine love, the testimony of the Son to the Father in the bond of the Holy Spirit.

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